Golf

When learning Thomsen was writing Golf: Find Center, Enter the Circle, many had emphasized the diversity of golf due to its natural setting, and golf's natural setting was open to amateurs, professionals, and all ages also.

Thomsen was quick to agree. "Golf can serve the needs of many. It's my job to open up to more and increase the standards within the art form-golf." Thomsen said.

Some have asked, "Who do you think will read it, Jack?"

"Few," came the reply. "Golfers mainly, and only the most obsessive of those. There's no popular market for this book. Materialism is too much in demand, and serving the spirit has become lost in the equation."

That brief exchange reveals an unvarnished truth: golf is essentially caught in a materialistic grasp as an overview of the game, and yet as an art form, independent players function in it. The artist Vincent van Gogh had sold few of his paintings. Someone else had done that.

Is the treasure the money or the art?

Golf: Find Center, Enter the Circle's genesis from a personal journal's beginning had been imbued with a Joycean stream of consciousness that, in its intuitiveness, is likely to engage none but the determined reader. By way of contrast, however, the book's title forthrightly distills Thomsen's thesis. Golf, he asserts, can be a spiritual practice when done as an expression of the golfer's essential self and if engaged in it for the sheer love of golf's diversity, its wholeness, bringing on its transcendental nature.

Accept Thomsen's invitation. Turn your attention inward, tap into the answers that are there, feel the resultant centering, the balance, and project that centering-enter the circle. "A liberated person possesses perfect senses and with perfect senses only can serve the sense proprietor," says the Bhagavad Gita.